[ Rebecca L. Skinner Green ]

Associate Professor, Art History


Teaching Specialization: World Art and culture

Courses Taught

Green teaches graduate and undergraduate courses including surveys, and all the World art history courses offered at BGSU: African, Oceanic, Asian, and MesoAmerican art and culture. She also teaches two study-abroad courses to Ghana, West Africa and Bali, Indonesia.

Areas of Research/Artistic Focus

Her research focuses on traditional and contemporary art and culture in Africa, with particular specialization on Madagascar, where she studies the elaborate relationships between ancestors, funerary practices, divination, gender roles, and traditional and contemporary art. Her research is also expanding into art and culture in the Caribbean, with primary focus on Trinidad and Tobago.  Her work has been sponsored by a Social Science Research Council fellowship, a Foreign Language Area Studies grant, a Fulbright fellowship, two Fulbright-Hays fellowships, and an American Association of University Women fellowship, and has been the subject for articles, books, edited volumes, and curated exhibitions.

Recent Accomplishments

Green's most recent conference presentations include Community Murals in South Africa: Potentials for Caribbean Artistic Response to HIV/AIDS (co-authored with Lynn M. Brinkman), presented at the 2011 Caribbean HIV conference in The Bahamas (November 2011), and Kenwyn Crichlow: Post-Colonial Revisioning and Reimagining of the Caribbean Aesthetic (co-authored with Ewart C. Skinner), presented at the 15th Triennial Symposium of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association in Los Angeles (March 2011).

Green's most recent publications include a number of chapters, including:  "Conceptions of Identity and Tradition in Highland Malagasy Clothing," in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture. Special Issue: African Fashion/African Style. Victoria Rovine (editor), 13(2):177-214. June 2009;   and "From Cemetery to Runway: Dress and Identity in Highland Madagascar," in Contemporary African Fashion. Suzanne Gott and Tina Loughran (eds). pp.138-153. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. 2010.   Green has also authored: "Kanga/Proverb Cloths‚" in Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, Valerie Steele (ed.), Detroit: Charles Scribner & Sons, 2005;  "Betsileo Textiles: Negotiating Identity Between the Living and the Dead," in Unwrapping A Little-Known Textile Tradition: The Field Museum's Madagascar Textile Collection. Chapurukha M. Kusimba, Judy Odland, and Bennet Bronson (eds).  Los Angeles: UCLA's Fowler Museum, 2005;   and "Ancestral Dreams: Re-Visiting the Past, Re-Living the Present, Re-Creating the Future," in Memory and Representation: Constructed Truths and Competing Realities.  Eber, Dena E., and Arthur G. Neal (eds), Bowling Green: Popular Culture Press, 2001.
 
Green is currently writing two books, on traditional arts of highland Madagascar, and on contemporary Malagasy art, as well as working on projects concerning the use of public community art in the fight against HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean, and on contemporary artists in Trinidad/Tobago.

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Faculty member at BGSU since 1996.

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